The Ghostwriter(33)
“That’s the most unromantic story I have ever heard.” He looks dismayed, so much so that I laugh.
“Disappointed in the Queen of Romance?” I tease. The Queen of Romance. Such a joke, the title handed down by my publisher, a New York powerhouse that doesn’t have the foggiest idea of my innermost thoughts.
“Heartbroken.” He sighs, and leans forward over the page. “Do you want to tell the proposal like that? It’s a little awkward.”
“I suppose you did it better.”
He rubs a thick finger over his forehead, and I’ll be damned if the man isn’t blushing. “I did okay.”
“Tell me.” I scratch an itchy spot on my nose.
“It wasn’t anything major. We were at her parents’ house—a tiny crackerbox of a place in Mississippi. I asked her father, then asked her to go on a walk. Did it there.” He blinks, and I can see the vacant stare of a memory in his eyes, one edge of his mouth lifting up.
“It was getting dark, and the mosquitos were so bad, you could barely pause without waving one off. She hadn’t wanted to go for a walk—and was complaining up a storm… about the heat, about the bugs. I finally stopped her under this big old tree and told her to shut her mouth long enough for me to propose.”
He looks at me, and his mouth fully breaks into a grin. “She missed the proposal entirely. She just kept smacking at bugs and looking up into the tree like she might scale it. I had to hold her arms still and get her to look in my eyes. Then, I asked her again.” He shrugs. “And she said yes.”
“That’s sweet.” And it is, in a redneck sort of way. “What kind of girl was she?”
He surprises me, laughing. “Reckless. You ever met a Cajun woman?”
“No.”
“They’re hell. I thought women from Texas had backbone. Half our relationship, I was terrified of her. The other half I spent trying my best to protect her from herself.”
“Meaning what?”
“She was wild. Not afraid of anything. She’d climb on our wildest stallion and try to break him. She’d walk into the worst bar in Memphis and make friends.” He looks down at the page, his smile drooping into something more melancholy.
I’d envisioned his wife as a chubby ball of Southern hospitality, one with an apron on and Christian music softly playing. Instead, she sounds fascinating, the type of woman I want to get on paper, right away, before her vision fades, before he says another word and ruins her. “Is your daughter like her?”
“Not really. I think God looked at the two of us and picked out the better parts. Maggie is quieter. She thinks through things before she acts. And she doesn’t drink or smoke—has no interest in either.” I glance at the soda before him, knowing the answer but still wanting to voice the question.
“Who was the drinker?”
“Both of us. She with wine, me with liquor. Luckily, we were both friendly drunks.” He runs a hand over the knee of his jeans. “Ready to get back to work?”
It is an abrupt change, and I watch as he stands and stretches. “Sure.” I pick up the pen and eye the clean page before me. Part of me wants to go back to work. The other part of me wants to abandon the novel altogether, to run away from Simon and his crooked smile and all of the ways he used to make me feel.
We all have a Happily Ever After, each story just needs to pick the right time to claim it. And at this stage in the Simon and Helena story, this is as good as it got: his proposal, my carefully considered acceptance. After this? After our wedding?
It started to go downhill.
As Mark writes, I steal out of the office and down the hall. I stop at Bethany’s door, gulping at air, and I don’t know if I’m breathless from the exertion of movement or what I’m about to do. When I finally reach forward, my hands tremble, carefully pulling at the edges of the tape, undoing the handwritten piece of paper—one of her first lists—from the door.
“My rules!” When she screamed, I could feel it in my bones, brittle parts of me breaking inside. “You said that I could request reasonable things and that my feelings would be respected!”
“We can’t remember all of your rules, Bethany.” I turned to Simon helplessly. This is why I hadn’t wanted a child. I had fifteen hundred words left to write, and she was throwing a temper tantrum over me turning off her bedroom light.
“Why don’t you write them down?” Simon suggested, crouching down before her, his hands gently holding hers. “Write down your requests, and we’ll vote on them, as a family. If they are all reasonable, then you can keep them, and we will follow them.”
“You promise?” It wasn’t a request, but a threat, her eyes cutting to me, accusation in them. “You’ll follow the rules, Mommy?”
“Yes,” I said exasperated. “I’ll follow the rules.”
My rules had always been an unorganized set—lists I kept in my head, though I certainly vocalized them enough during my life. It wasn’t until Bethany created her own, her practiced script posted on that empty door, that I realized how much simpler it was when the rules were properly stated and communicated. Less than a week after we voted on Bethany’s rules, I began recording my own. Some, like Kate Rodant’s, I shared with the applicable parties. Others, like my Ten Rules for Dealing With My Mother, or my Five Rules of Sex, I kept to myself, in a notebook, frequently editing them, depending on my moods. I didn’t write a set for Simon. If I had, they would have drained my pens of ink. He was a walking pile of mess and disorganization, a man who enjoyed hangovers and dripping nachos, impromptu sex and a lack of retirement planning.